The KDE Restoration Project was a personal pet project that born around last QtCon and i took as a letter of love for the project that basically formed my professional life.

So this mad-man (or genius, it’s hard to say) has revamped the original KDE 1.0 code for the modern era. A very cool project, and fascinating to see old tech anew. Of course, sometimes our memories of how awesome something was is more powerful than the reality of how awesome it actually was. It’s left for you to decide if that’s the case here or not though :)

A while ago, we’ve announced our plans to add Linux support as one of the features of our digital platform, with 100 games on the launch day sometime this fall. We’ve put much time and effort into this project and now we’ve found ourselves with over 50 titles, classic and new, prepared for distribution, site infrastructure ready, support team trained and standing by, and absolutely no reason to wait until October or November. We’re still aiming to have at least 100 Linux games in the coming months, but we’ve decided not to delay the launch just for the sake of having a nice-looking number to show off to the press. It’s not about them, after all, it’s about you. So, one of the most popular site feature requests on our community wishlist is granted today: Linux support has officially arrived on GOG.com!

The bug is the result of commands in a section of the GnuTLS code that verify the authenticity of TLS certificates, which are often known simply as X509 certificates. The coding error, which may have been present in the code since 2005, causes critical verification checks to be terminated, drawing ironic parallels to the extremely critical “goto fail” flaw that for months put users of Apple’s iOS and OS X operating systems at risk of surreptitious eavesdropping attacks. Apple developers have since patched the bug.

This release includes are nftables, the successor of iptables, a revamp of the block layer designed for high-performance SSDs, a power capping framework to cap power consumption in Intel RAPL devices […]

Getting back to some “light” linux programming this holiday season? Check out Ben Collins 5 part series on Writing an ALSA driver. It’s all there, and if you’re interested in a jump start to kernel and deep linux programming, this is an excellent start.

The release of the Linux desktop suite Luna from the Elementary OS team has prompted a nice article entitled The Road to Luna on their blog:

In April of 2011, a small group of high school and college kids released an Ubuntu 10.10 remaster that we called elementary OS “Jupiter”. And for us, it was huge. It was a demonstration of a desire to create a Linux-based OS that championed consistency and great design. It featured several home-grown apps and heavy patches to the UI of others.

Woe is Linux writes John C. Dvorak in PCMag, proclaiming the death of Linux (well, at least on the desktop) and running through what the community did and didn’t do to make Linux the success it turned out to be (for good or bad).

It boils down to the marketing. The Open Source community, as a whole, doesn’t believe in the idea that sales and marketing is actually important. All that ever passed for marketing with that bunch was the gimmicky but cute “Tux” the Linux penguin.

He concludes with:

With Linux never catching on and the rise of the cloud-centric operating systems alongside the weak phone/tablet OS taking over, everyone is back where they started: pre-1975. Centralized control wins out. I guess that is what the public wanted all along and the “personal” computer movement was actually a fad. Who knew?

I can’t say I disagree. I believe that linux is a better OS at it’s core than Windows and somewhat (due to toolkit availability) Mac (which is Unix at the core already). However, it really depends on what you define as “better”. A 1000% better OS that doesn’t have the apps I use (Lightroom, Photoshop) isn’t actually better. A 1000% better OS that is super secure and super stable but only has a command line interface (like DOS?) may not actually be better.

I’ve always thought that the success and failure with Linux has been with the community. Not only the supportive community, but the community that will proclaim they’ve “never even touched a Mac” while proclaiming that Mac’s suck. Or the community which values choice (a good thing), but uses it to create 18 half baked audio players instead of one or two that are full featured (a bad thing, in my opinion).

Will this article have any effect on the community? Nope. No investors are there to pull out (well, in theory) and the coders who slave day and night to produce code will most likely continue on as before. Same with the users. If you use Linux as your desktop, or go to the trouble of finding a linux laptop for sale, you’ll continue on just fine.

Ilja van Sprundel, a security researcher with IOActive, has discovered a large number of issues in the way various X client libraries handle the responses they receive from servers, and has worked with X.Org’s security team to analyze, confirm, and fix these issues.

Fixes are underway already, and it sounds like (to someone not hugely versed in deep x.org code) the issues aren’t going to affect the normal linux user running behind a firewall, but if you run unchecked code from untrusted sources locally (or allow other users to connect to the X.org port remotely), be careful. Keep up to date with updates and make sure your system is patched over the next week or two.

Like the other two titles Valve has made available for Linux last week: Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal, the Half-Life 2 games are in beta for now and they don’t show up in the Linux section on Steam but if you didn’t purchase them already, you can simply search for them in the All Items section and they should install on Linux. Or you can click the links below[…]

“LibreOffice 4.0 is a milestone in interoperability and an excellent foundation for our continued work to improve the User Interface,” says Florian Effenberger, Chairman of the Board of Directors at The Document Foundation - the hands steering the project.

MyPaint is especially designed to create images from scratch and it’s not intended to be an image manipulation application (like GIMP), although you can still do many such operations using it. The application features a simple interface, unlimited canvas, extensive brush creation, basic layer support and more and is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OSX.

If you’re into painting and not the heavy graphics that something like the gimp is designed for, this looks nice.

E16 is old, but technically, so is its successor whose release we celebrate today. The first bit of code for Enlightenment 0.17 (yes, 0.17) was committed to cvs a long, long time ago. “The first wave of files were committed to CVS on Friday the 8th of December [2000] at 22:52:54 UTC. More will certainly follow in the next couple of weeks and months,” Martin Geisler wrote 12 years ago.

Unix was invented in the 60s. It’s considered arcane, complicated, inconsistent and unfriendly by many. And yet it, and its derivatives, are absolutely everywhere today - BSD, Linux, OS X, iOS, Android; it’s on PCs, iPhones, and servers - whereas many ‘friendlier’ and allegedly-better alternatives have appeared and died out in the meantime leaving barely a trace. Why is that? And why does it have such weird names and jargon?

Well worth the read if you have any interest in Linux and didn’t grow up at a time when Linux didn’t have a GUI.

Congrats to the GNOME team for another great looking release! You can check out the GNOME 3.6 Release Notes for details of what’s changed since 3.5.

GNOME 3.6 is the latest update to GNOME 3 and represents 6 months of work by the GNOME Project. It delivers a number of major new features, including a reworked Activities Overview, updated message tray and notifications, an enhanced Files application, as well as improved accessibility support and integrated input sources for using different languages. It also incorporates a host of smaller enhancements. Together, these changes make GNOME 3 better than ever before.

You can get GNOME 3.6 here, either in a live CD or the details for your existing linux distro.

The Left 4 Dead Blog has some juicy bits about Steam Workshop coming to Left 4 Dead as Linux.

All of this will also be available not just on the PC and Mac, but also for Linux users as well starting in the middle of next month and rolling out from there. We will have more details as we get closer to launch.

I’m honestly not a L4D player, so I wholly admit that I could be reading this wrong (though where I saw it posted said “Steam coming to linux confirmed”), as I don’t really know what the Steam Workshop is or how that relates, but anything that’s Steam related that is coming to Linux is a good thing, and does follow previous rumors about Valve working on a Linux port.

Am I happier now without Linux? Definitely! Is OSX a better OS than Linux? Absolutely not! It does have a much better desktop experience and since I spend most of the time on a computer interacting with the desktop - that’s a big win for me. Of course I wouldn’t mind seeing Linux achieve this level of desktop maturity and stability.

I have to mostly agree with what he’s found, the good, bad and ugly mostly mirror my own experiences (though I continue to use both Linux and OS/X as my daily work and home desktops respectively), with the exception that I use Vim, the One True Editor, and don’t care about the missing right control key at all :)

Interesting to go through the comments on both the site and the OSNews story to see some of the differing views, as well as their level of, well, aggressiveness (why is it when someone who is not an Apple fan hears any story about someone liking Apple they are convinced that the review can in no way be objective and the person is either a shill, or that any complaints you had about whatever it is that isn’t Apple in the comparison are in fact your fault or “they work fine for me therefore you are wrong”. I suppose this isn’t Apple specific, but more than a few of the comments that aren’t reasonable discourse seem to go in this direction. The level of passive-aggressive insults in the comments are pretty high in some places too, for example this from “ix” in response to his assertions that the hardware support and coupling of Mac hardware and software results in some superior aspects such as power management:

” I think that Macs are good for people who don’t want to tinker with their PC & OS and who don’t mind throwing money away, I think I could buy two normal laptops with the same specs for the price of one Macbook. Plus, I don’t think Macs are good for games.”

But as a desktop OS, Windows 8 got a universal thumbs down from our testers. They didn’t like being forced to use an OS designed primarily for touchscreen devices with limited real estate, such as a tablet or phone, on their multi-core desktops with wide-screen FullHD displays. Ubuntu’s Unity had pretty much the same criticisms in its early incarnations, but they have evolved since. In fact, much to our surprise, existing Ubuntu users had a much smoother experience with Windows 8 than existing Windows users!

Linus Torvalds responded to Icaza’s claims on Google+, claiming that suggestions that the Linux kernel were responsible for instilling developers with an attitude that resulted in problems for GNOME were ’laughable’.

There’s a lot of talk about what “the desktop” is and what “dead” is, and many, many comments related to this. I believe that Miguel’s original post mostly stands however, in terms of the “people moved to OS/X because they don’t want to screw with their audio setup every six weeks just to get sound” part anyway. But that’s just me.

Miguel de Icaza, one of the founders of the GNOME project, has said that OS X has ‘killed the Linux desktop’.

Definitely some stuff to think on in there, and as someone who was a full on Linux fanboy from 1994 to 2008 or so, it’s sad but (in a way, and IMHO), true. There will always be a Linux Desktop, and I think that everyone will agree that the “Year of the Linux Desktop” is mostly a joke right now, and this is just someone enumerating why the Linux Desktop failed.

All is not lost. Apple is getting some interesting blow back for being too big (after years of getting blow back for being too small), Windows is… well, Windows, and Microsoft is the company everyone loves to hate, so Linux really is the OS to go to for a lot of people. Thing that has to happen is the default install on say, an 8 core, 6G modern machine, shouldn’t peg the RAM and CPU for the first 5 minutes of use, at least, based on my Ubuntu 12.04 install on a modern and fast laptop.

Regardless of my bitching about Ubuntu, Miguel has some good points about the alienation of third party software developers, seen in the lack of a stable standard for things like audio and video and the massive number of available linux distributions.

Microsoft: Ok, we’ve improved our security and have implemented very secure code signing for our hardware to specifically prevent any sort of boot sector viruses from getting in because you can’t run arbitrary code on boot.

Linux:Waaaaaaahhhhhh! Stupid Microsoft makes it impossible to boot our arbitrary code and it’s too secure so we can’t install other Operating Systems on the hardware!

Simplicity is not the same as slashing-and-burning features that you personally never use. I know that 37signal’s web 3.0 siren song of “simple and beautiful” is tempting, but it’s done more damage than good: Developers get sucked in to this “people only understand simple” fantasy world and forget that they’re developers, not designers, and not only that but in this case they don’t even represent their own target market.

I think that the ‘perfect is the enemy of good’ quote is appropriate here as well, and that while I love Linux, it’s time to face certain realities and start aiming at

GIMP Magazine features the amazing works created from this world wide community. Photography, digital arts, graphic arts, design, tips & tricks, step by step tutorials, master classes, help desk questions, book and product reviews and so much more are showcased and explored in this quarterly publication. This publication is available for free and is licensed Creative Commons CC-AT-SA 2.5.

Summary: This release includes support for metadata checksums in ext4, userspace probes for performance profiling with tools like Systemtap or perf, a sandboxing mechanism that allows to filters syscalls, a new network queue management algorithm designed to fight bufferbloat, support for checkpointing and restoring TCP connections, support for TCP Early Retransmit (RFC 5827), support for Android-style opportunistic suspend, btrfs I/O failure statistics, and SCSI over Firewire and USB. Many small features and new drivers and fixes are also available.

Sadly not as exciting as it used to be back in the 1.0 and 2.0 days, but still, progress is progress :)

For some time, Gabe has been interested in the possibility of moving Steam and the Source game engine to Linux. At the time, the company was already using Linux by supporting Linux-based servers for Source-based games and also by maintaining several internal servers (running a 64-bit version of Ubuntu server) for various projects. In 2011, based on the success of those efforts and conversations in the hallway, we decided to take the next step and form a new team. At that time, the team only consisted of a few people whose main purpose was investigating the possibility of moving the Steam client and Left 4 Dead 2 over to Ubuntu.

The short story is this. Using the default IM client in Ubuntu (arguably one of, if not the, most popular Linux distribution) you cannot block contacts. This is a bug that’s been around since (at least) 2007 and the last reply (a year ago) to the bug was “Patches welcome”.

I appreciate that this is free software. I understand that I can get the source and fix it myself. But if you’re a “real company” making a linux distro you’d think that after 5 years someone would have done something more than “patches welcome.

The scenario is this. Every morning I put my IM client online. Immediately I get 3-5 messages of “hey hows it going” or “I’m bored, what are you up to” from randomhotchick7452@hotmail.com like addresses. I go to the contact menu, select block, and close the window. Sometimes the contact is already blocked. The next day, or the next time I go online, I get the same messages, from the same (or similar) contacts. I block them all. It does nothing.

A while back I tracked this down to a bug in libpurple, the core IM library used by Pidgin and Empathy, the core IM clients used under Linux.

There’s Bug 551911, reported 2008, last update a few days ago (2012-05-07) with someone with the same issue. There’s also Ticket 2939, reported 2007, reporting a similar issue, with the last update being 12 months ago with this update:

Changed 12 months ago by salinasv
milestone set to Plugin Suggested
Discarding messages form a blacklist can be done in a plugin.
If you prefer a privacy option, “Patches welcome”.

Most of the replies regarding the issue in both bugs seem to be either:

“[othertool/library] doesn’t implement this so we can’t yet”

“Doing this right is hard and there’s incomplete documentation, results, etc”

I don’t have this problem on any IM I use on the Mac or Windows. I appreciate that it’s hard to get it right, but the end result is that the end user (me) is getting spam, getting annoyed, and my overall Linux desktop experience is diminished by this. I echo the sentiment of a comment from 13 months ago by “cydon”:

Seriously now, I appreciate very much the effort open source developers put into programs with no compensation whatsoever but this has been ignored for 4 years. I have been waiting for this to be fixed for 3. The only reason I was not impatient is that I very rarely use the block function. So, the question is this. Are you ever going to fix this or will I have to (regrettably) change my client?
To hell with winks, handwritten messages and voice clips. We are talking about basic functionality here that creates huge privacy problems when its not implemented and you only find out when you test it. Are you serious about creating a client for the MSN as well or not?

The…. “challenge” that open source software has, and has always had, is that doing things like implementing contact blocking isn’t sexy. Making an IM whiteboard is sexy. Voice chat is sexy. Implementing a complete new desktop paradigm is sexy. Squashing bugs isn’t. Making the whole new desktop paradigm more usable isn’t.

I love linux, I really do, I’ve been a user since 1993 and an advocate of the “Year of The Linux Desktop”, but it seems more apparent that lately Linux is doing what the Mac did in the 90’s when Apple stopped innovating and let Windows beat them. Linux was equal, if not ahead, of the Mac and Windows desktops in terms of features, speed, usability, and other areas up until the GNOME 2 timeframe, but then it wallowed in a world of looking like a really great rip off of the Windows 95/98 look and feel when the rest of the world moved on. Linux advocates (and I put myself in this category) seem to have an aversion to looking at or using anything but, perhaps because it looks far cooler to laugh at “Micro$loth” and “CrApple” than it is to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, someone else has a better system than [Insert your Favorite Thing Here].

I’ve heard Linux advocates proudly proclaim “I’ve never even seen MacOS” right after telling you that it’s crap. It’s this same attitude that I believe is holding Linux back from the desktop (ignoring of course that Linux is Android and Android is used by a ton of people, probably more than Linux on the desktop). I’m not saying that Linux desktop developers should blindly follow Windows and Mac desktops, but ignoring them completely, or worse ignoring what makes them popular (ie: attention to detail, easy developer tools to use, etc). It’s not all like this, Ubuntu’s desktop has definitely borrowed from MacOS with some of their UI elements, and they’ve also gone a completely different direction with Unity, which I give them full kudos for doing something different, same as I do for Microsoft for going their own direction with Windows Phone.

Anyway, long rant which is a roundabout way of saying “gosh I really wish I could block MSN spam on my Linux desktop”.

Ok, I admit I’m biased towards the Photoshop world for my image manipulation, but this Cage tool screencast of the new tool in GIMP 2.8 looks pretty awesome. Hard to describe, so I’ve embedded it below.

Codeweavers, makers of Crossover, an app that allows you to seamlessly run Windows apps on either Linux or Mac (through Wine) has announced Crossover XI. The new version boasts running more apps (including Office 2010) and a huge number of bug fixes and updates behind the scenes.

Day explains that the beta release marks the beginning of the UI freeze, so “now seems like a good time to check out the cool stuff that’s coming in 3.4.” Day begins his tour stating that applications are “where many of the big changes can be found for this release.” Documents and Contact will now be joined by Boxes but more importantly, they will sport a sleeker new look.

Focus here is on polish, which is a good place to be (though I personally haven’t spent enough time in GNOME 3 to say if I like it or not). More details on the blog post.

We’ll show Ubuntu neatly integrated into Android at Mobile World Congress next week. Carry just the phone, and connect it to any monitor to get a full Ubuntu desktop with all the native apps you want, running on the same device at the same time as Android. Magic. Everything important is shared across the desktop and the phone in real time.

Basically it’s a way to extend desktop functionality to a tethered android smartphone. Incoming call alerts through GNOME notifications, contacts/calendar/data integrated from the phone into the desktop and a raft of other interesting stuff. Requirements are an Android 2.3 and HDMI out.

Even though I have some questions about this (ie: tethering? why not Bluetooth?) I think that this is very cool and is the sort of innovation that is great to see from the open source world.

Update: It seems I might have been a bit off in what I thought that the Ubuntu on Android app was actually doing. This video demo shows it’s more of a desktop view (using the standard unity desktop) of the phone. IE: Instead of the ubuntu running on your phone, when docked it runs ubuntu on your computer screen, from the phone. I think. Just watch the video, you’ll get it.

Nvidia Optimus is a technology available for notebooks, used to increases battery life by switching the dedicated GPU off when it’s not needed and then switching it on again when it’s needed. When the dedicated GPU is off, the integrated graphics chip is used.

Nvidia Optimus GPU switching is officially only supported on Windows 7, but it’s also unofficially available on Linux thanks to the Bumblebee project.

I hadn't heard about u1db before reading about it in the Linux Hater's Blog. I have to say that even as a linux lover I agree with the sentiment that this seems like something that is solving a problem that isn't really there and is going to take away productive programmers from fixing the actual issues that are present in the latest Ubuntu. For example, here is my list.

The gist is to move all binaries to /usr/bin, and all libraries to /usr/lib and /user/lib64.

I remember when the LSB came out and was an essentially a HIG for the filesystem, defining what /usr, /var, /etc, etc were all set to be used for across all distros. I personally applaud this move towards a bit of simplification, if they can do it right. I hate not remembering if things are in /usr/lib, /var/lib/cache, /var/cache, etc, but jamming everything into /usr/lib/ and /usr/bin/ might not be the best solution.

Big day as Linux Kernel 3.1 is released. Notable changes include NFC chip support, a new iSCSI implementation, userspace power management and Wii controller support. In short, lots of techie stuff, but not a whole lot that one could write bit banners about. This isn't a bad thing, Linux is a mature kernel that I don't see a lot of "big" changes coming to any time soon.

... and I have to agree with him. Back in the day, having StarofficeOpenOffice LibreOffice and Gimp and the few others was awesome, but that situation hasn't really changed. The apps have gotten better, but they are the same apps. Yup, InkScape is amazing, free and open source, but it's been around since 2003, where are the new apps? In the Mac and Windows world new great apps are popping up all the time, less often the great of course, but even a couple of new, truly great apps a year is great, and needed for a vibrant ecosystem, and the Linux desktop feels like it's just re-polishing the same set of 10 or 20 great apps (and of course all the other less great ones) every year.

I put part of the blame on the distros, as if it's not in the latest Ubuntu/Fedora/etc chances are it's not going to get the mass appeal that other apps get, plus the attention, bug reports, and polish. But still, maybe the fact that you're not charging $34 a license for your app means you don't get something high quality, like the linked FTP client for the Mac.

But what Microsoft are not doing is asking OEMs to prevent Secure Boot being disabled by the user: -

"...such decisions are left to the OEM. There may be good reasons why certain enterprises may not want PCs that can be configured in such a way, and there may be good reasons why an OEM or white box retailer may choose to allow that flexiblity (sic) for their customers. It's all about choice and flexibility."

Interesting. Personally I think that throwing your hands up in the air and screaming about injustice is not the thing to do right, especially since (as I understand) this whole thing started with a Redhat employee wondering out loud if the new UEFI support in Windows8 could be used to lock out Linux. Also Windows 8 supports the new (modern, and built after 1981) BIOS standard, and if this is used to lock out other OSs it'll be done by OEMs, not Microsoft. Still to get the Windows 8 hardware certification OEMs do have to use this (as I understand it). I recommend listening to this week's Windows Weekly where Paul Thurrott addresses some of this (somewhere around the 28:22 minute mark).

Up and coming task management software Wunderlist is now available for linux! Kudos to the guys at Wunderkinder for supporting almost every platform under the sun (Web, Mac, Windows, iPad, iPhone, Android and now Linux (64 and 32 bit)). The only platform they don't currently have a version for is Windows Phone 7 phones, but I expect that either there's no demand or they are working on a version.

I have to say I'm impressed and happy to see this, honestly. I wonder how much of the Linux port had to do with the Android port?

Update: Forgot to mention that Wunderlist also includes full cloud sync as well, all for free.

If you're one of the lucky few who got an HP Touchpad for $99 (or the unlucky even-fewer who paid $499) and want to do something different with it, here are some step-by-step instructions (not for the non-geek) on How To Install Ubuntu On Your HP Touchpad.

Want to give the new Natty Narwhal version of Ubuntu Linux before it's out? Using some cool remote desktop stuff you can now Try Ubuntu online before you download. Not 100% with the 3D stuff, and it's only a 15 minute session, but it definitely is neat to check things out first. Kudos for the test drive guys for setting this all up.

Good news if you want to check out the latest goodies that are coming out in the GNOME world.... Gnome-Shell gets a Live CD, so you can safely try what will be coming out in the not-so-far future in Linux GNOME based distros.

The ethX naming scheme works fine as long as the system has only one Ethernet port. However if there are more than one Ethernet ports, a sort of race condition develops at every system boot and the ports may get their names in an arbitrary order. Suppose we have two Ethernet devices - eth0 and eth1. It cannot be ensured that eth0 will remain as eth0 and eth1 will remain as eth1 after the next system boot. The names will be allocated arbitrarily. This is generally not a problem in personal computers because there is only one port. However, some servers have multiple Ethernet ports and this naming scheme creates problems in such cases.

Makes sense, but not sure I like it. Kudos to OSNews for the original link.

A fast and sexy program launcher called Synapse Launcher is out. This is a re-do of Gnome-Do, or if you're more familiar with the Windows or Mac world, think QuickSilver, LaunchBar or Launchy. Looks good for sure, looking forward to playing with this one.

Some mad linux hacker got a Kinect open source driver working only after a few hours in a completely clean-room manner. Awesome. Wonder what stuff people are going to use this for. Home security? Linux desktop face recognition logins? Skynet?

I still use a linux desktop for my development work, and while there are still issues compared to the integration of Mac OS or the support in the software and hardware world of Windows, I don't really think that it's "dead". The author is more saying that:

Ultimately, Linux is doomed on the desktop because of a critical lack of content. And that lack of content owes its existence to two key factors: the fragmentation of the Linux platform, and the fierce ideology of the open-source community at large."

That all said, Linux and the Linux Desktop and Linux fanboys are going nowhere soon. GNOME 3.0 is in the horizon, and even without the critical acceptance from the world in general (what we all dreamed about in the mid-90s), the people who use Linux on the desktop will continue to rally and support it for a long time. I do agree that I don't think that the Linux community believes they'll overtake Mac or Windows any time soon.

Well, the RC for the latest version of the Ubuntu Linux distro is available! You can get Ubuntu 10.10 RC (Maverick Meerkat) now. You may want to check out the known issues first though. They do consider this a stable RC ready for all though.

Prost to Gallium3D and the open-source Mesa developers for making this milestone possible! Hopefully soon we can finally see an OpenGL 3.x/4.0 state tracker too. Implementing Direct3D 10/11 on Linux required around 26,000 lines of code to be added to Mesa.

A 32bit download of µTorrent for linux is available. Basically it's a remote controlable server that you can add downloads to from somewhere else. Not a client sadly, but no doubt using the uTorrent core under the hood.

Nice collection of 211 free Wine-compatible Games in one download found by OMG Ubuntu, so you can play them on your Linux system (speaking of Linux and Gaming). The list of games in the download can be found here. See the OMG Ubuntu article for details and direct download and torrent links.

GNOME is driven by its goals to provide a quality free software desktop, and we feel that our users and downstream community are better served by holding the GNOME 3.0 release until March 2011. This gives adequate time not only for feature development, but user feedback and testing.

Having 3.0 ready for the "next" GNOME release was a pretty aggressive goal, especially with no "real" alphas or test releases out, and the only real evidence that the great "3.0" milestone being a hodgepodge of software released. Still, I'd rather 3.0 come out fully baked and ready for the world than a thrown together mix of software, paradigms and APIs. Still, it is a bit of sad news for those of us who were looking forward to 3.0 to come out this year.

The awesome guys over at CodeWeavers have released Crossover 9.1 and Crossover Games 9.1. The official announcement is here. Both have lots of fixes, work with WINE 1.2, and Games now official supports Starcraft 2 (yay!), Modern Warfare 2, and a bunch of others.

Not sure how "new" this is, but the F.Lux app that I use on Windows and Mac now works in Ubuntu. F.Lux automatically adjusts the lighting of your screen to be more natural which (in theory) will help your body go to sleep more easily after using the computer late into the night.

For those Linux users in a area that geographically supports Spotify, you'll be happy to see that there's an alpha of Spotify for Linux available. I understand the 'real' client works ok under WINE as well though.

After all the Apple news today (you may have heard they released some iPhone thing), you'll be happy to know I'm getting back to "real" news and present to you a story from OSNews on a Native ZFS Port for Linux.

So a cool Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Video Review over at OMG! UBUNTU! By a girl. Who likes Linux. You may pick your jaws up from the floor now nerdy guys. It's a nice overview of the OS and the newest features, hitting both the high and low points of some of the more prominent UI issues.

We have confirmed that Valve's latest and popular titles like Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, and Team Fortress 2 are among the first of the Steam Linux titles, similar to the Mac OS X support. The released Linux client should be available by the end of summer.

The controversial decision by Ubuntu for moving the window control icons from the right to the left might become a bit more interesting now that some of the documents about what's to be done is coming to light. Mark Shuttleworth has posted some mockup drawings of the things that will be able to be done in the next version of Ubuntu now that the right side of the window border is freed up.

The Zeitgeist Project (the GNOME information logger, not the conspiracy theory nuts) has announced 0.3.3 which ads a bunch of fixes and magic. Looks like a nifty upgrade for folks running some of the GNOME 3.0 beta stuff.

Great Real Time Earth Wallpaper 'GloboCarbon' showcased (with install instructions) over at OMG Ubuntu. Not really polished, but if the screenshot on the site is any indication, it's pretty damn cool looking. Linux only.

Got the press release that CodeWeavers have released Crossover 9.0 (Snow Mallard), the first ground up revamp of their software since version 1.0. Crossover, if you don't know, is a commercial wrapper around Wine to allow you easily run windows software on Linux.

Great look at what some people's ideas of The Future Of Nautilus. A nice look at some of the horrible UI that's in the current version, and some very sexy mockups of what it could look like. Fingers crossed for something like this in Lucid.

Some new hotness in Banshee 1.5.3 the fantastic Linux media player written in Mono. Among the new stuff is something I'd love for iTunes on my Mac to have, folder watching:

A long requested feature - already present in Rhythmbox - has been the ability for Banshee to watch your libraries' folders for added, renamed, or deleted files and updating Banshee accordingly. Well - it's here! (Although you have to enable it via the Extensions menu).

This came up today in conversation with someone, and I had to post THE classic Unix horror story, originally posted in 1986 regarding what to do if you accidentally rm -rf / on your unix system. Great classic story.

Took me a while to find it, I ended up using keywords of ksh, rm -rf, and echo to find it :)

Gotta thank a post from last year on Chu-Cheng's Public Note on how to make the "ls --color" lighter and more readable. Works like a charm and fixes the issue where you have the almost unreadable default dark blue color against a black terminal screen. This tweaks it just a bit lighter and perfectly readable. Yay!

OMG Ubuntu has info on how to Get An Animated & Themed GRUB Menu Using BURG. The screen shots and embedded video look very nice. It is new software and does muck with your bootloader, so be very careful if you're going to install this on any production machines, and make sure you have a boot disk available just in case (tm).

CIO.com.au has a feature on the as-yet-unreleased (but to be released in 2010) KDE 4.4. KDE took some critique when it released version 4.0 a few years back and basically called it a beta. Well, it's gotten much better since then, and the new 4.4 has some very interesting looking stuff coming to it.

Personally I've had no issues with it, so far anyway. There are a couple of minor issues, neither of which I don't think is related to the distro. One is my hard drive seems to be having some errors, but smartctl says there are none, and the other was it took some magic when I swapped video cards, trading an nVidia for an ATI. I documented how to do this here though.

OMG actual Linux news? From OMG Ubuntu, an excellent site I discovered recently, it sounds like Gnome 3.0 Will Be Delayed Until September 2010 simply because of the state of the project (beta quality) and the GNOME release timetable. Personally I'd rather wait and get something good instead of having something unstable. Course, I'd also like to have the new GNOME 3.0 shell to play with, cause it looks like this'll make GNOME take a revolutionary step forward instead of the evolutionary ones that the last few 2.x releases have been.

So I've known forever that the 'vimdiff' program does a diff with two files in Vim, but it's always annoyed me that I have to run that as a new editor instance. The Daily Vim tipped me off that you could run ":vert diffsplit filename" from inside your currently running vim instance. Pretty cool.

Wow, this was about, well, 18 years in the making.... Aug. 25, 1991 is when Linus first posted about Linux, so happy birthday Linux!!

1991: Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old university student from Finland, writes a post to a user group asking for feedback on a little project he's working on. He's built a simple kernel for a Unix-like operating system that runs on an Intel 386 processor, and he wants to develop it further. The kernel eventually becomes Linux, which is released in 1994 and distributed over the internet for free.

On OSNews: Editorial: X Could Learn a Lot from Vista, Windows 7. Basically what we all know, X sucks and while it's mostly rock solid, having all the good bits built on top of something that can fairly easily bring you back to a console, or dump you back to a GDM login screen is kinda a sucky thing.

I love it when a good idea comes to life. In this case, the Dilbert cartoon where Wally programs his IM to randomly send messages to his boss.... well, someone built it using python and dbus. That is super-awesome.

Sometimes it takes something like this to truly show one of the major faults in the Linux world. I'm as big a fan as the next guy (well, unless the next guy isn't a Linux fan), but sometimes the.... "focus" of the community isn't quite where I think it should be :) I want my John Stewart smooth too!

Looks like I finally have fixed the error I've had since the install of the new server running on Ubuntu (8.10, but not relevant for this IMHO). I put some of the details here. Basically tons of segfaults in the apache2 log showed up after moving from Gentoo to Ubuntu. I found what looks like the answer here.

Basically in sysctl, the setting for fs.epoll.max_user_instances defaults to 128, which means that it restricts the number of child processes an application can have. Ergo, apache was being limited to 128 children, but in my /etc/apache2/apache2.conf the setting for MaxClients was the default of 150. This means, I think, that when apache tried to spawn more children, as it is want to do on this fairly busy server, the kernel would deny them.

I followed the instructions and set the sysctl variable to 4092, and so far, no errors! I'll see what happens when I try to post this :) Assuming you see it, it looks like it worked!

Via the Full Disclosure mailing list, looks like there's a exploitable hole in Linux 2.6.30 /SELinux/RHEL5 test kernel. I'm not 100% familiar with this, but being it's called "test kernel", I'm assuming this isn't properly released or in use in the real world yet. Link has more details.

Banshee, the excellent Linux media player on the road to version 2.0, has gotten some cool netbook focused UI changes. Aaron Bockover has details of project "Cubano" as well as some other news from the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.

The last couple of Ubuntu releases have been.... well..... "evolutionary" (read: kinda boring). Looks like the next release, 9.10, Karmic Koala has some really neat stuff (other than the awesome codename). Pin Stack has a good list detailing the changes.

OSNews passes on the info that Linux will Be the First to Support USB 3.0. Yea, it's still a bit hacky to get it done, but it is cool that Linux is the first OS with USB 3.0 support (at least publicly, who knows what MS and Apple are doing behind closed doors).

Yes, it's YAMTFL (Yet Another Mac Theme For Linux), and no, it's not going to give you the "real" mac experience (which IMHO Is more about UI and consistency than wallpaper and icon themes. Still, if you want to check it out, Phoenix: Mac4Lin ver.1.0 has been released.

Slashdot has an article on Harsh Words From Google On Linux Development. I've been saying something like this for a while, that Linux's greatest asset (choice) is also it's greatest challenge (nothing is consistant / uniform).

Course, to be fair, the exemplar of the opposite of this, Apple, who has a consistent UI toolkit, HIG, etc, also is no closer to having a native Chrome browser running either :(

Even I have sort of stopped the sillyness of "Linux on the (Mass Consumer) Desktop", as I write this from my Linux desktop however, I found Information Week's Windows 7 Vs. Linux: OS Face-Off. Definitely an interesting comparison in terms of what each OS has going for itself, and it does bring up a couple of things I hadn't thought about (ie: 32 vs 64bit issues).

Just discovered the Ubuntu Dust Theme Artwork page, with some nice extras, including a Firefox theme that fixes the annoying "black on black" in the awesomebar if you are just using the main "Dust" theme. Here's a shot of my desktop to show the awesomeness (new window).

Free Software Magazine has some of the new changes coming in The X Window system. They call it innovation, but from my read of it, it really sounds like "making the video drivers not suck". Though, on some systems, that would be a miracle and an innovation!

While the GNOME desktop plods on with more evolutionary than revolutionary changes, the video I just watched: Social Desktop Starts to Arrive shows that KDE isn't standing still either. They have created a social "engine" which gives user space applications (IE: applets) access to all sorts of interesting social website information. Friends, locations, etc. The big win here is that because the information is extracted out of the browser and into it's own standalone engine, suddenly all parts of the desktop will have access to (theoretically anyway) your facebook, twitter, myspace, etc data.

Yes this can be done now, and it's not like there aren't twitter clients for the Linux desktop, but in a very KDE move they have made a single data engine for this so the wheel doesn't have to be re-invented all the time, and applet/app developers can move faster to get cooler programs out to the world. Check out the video anyway, it's a nice demonstration of what those rascally KDE guys are up to!

Of course, it looks like a lot of the reduction of boot time is the post-X-starting time, which is really saying that GNOME and KDE do a lot of stuff after they get started up and before the desktop is usable. While I applaud the new UI, I'm wondering if another desktop interface, regardless of how fast starting, is going to be useful if it sacrifices things like session information and other "modern" capabilities. Still, innovation is always a good thing.

More of a clarification than anything, as with most OS/Phone/Editor/etc religious wars, it's all in the details as to if your "side" wins or loses. In this case the clarification was that people return netbooks of the same build quality an equal amount for windows and linux, vs tons of returns for Linux (which was what was claimed before). IE: people return crappy hardware regardless of the OS on it.

The Pidgin multi-provider instant messanger now has (as the blog post is titled) Voice! Video!. Great features to have, wonder if it'll work properly with other services that use voice and video (ie: google talk).

NOTE NOTE NOTE NOTE
This is very very very pre-alpha and should be almost called an Omega version (for me so pre-alpha it won't run :) and running probably isn't a good idea, as most likely it'll blow up and give you a bad impression. It is nice to know that things are progressing towards Linux and Mac builds though!

I found some good instructions for Ubuntu (intrepid, the latest) on this thread. Basically apt-get remove the libflash-nonfree package and put the downloaded .so file into your ~/.mozilla/plugins directory.

Cool article on Improving boot time on a general Linux distribution, a good read. That said, I haven't booted my linux system for a couple of months, so in this new world of always on computing a fast(er) boot isn't nearly as important as it used to be. That said, the machines I work with at work are servers with what feels like 10 or 15 separate bios modules that take forever to start up. A boot takes in the range of 5-10 minutes, 90% of that being the system booting up the ILOM bios, SATA controller BIOS, other controllers, and then it boots up linux (which is fast enough).

Via digg: Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits. Good stuff in there, lots of stuff known already by your standard unix hacker, but most likely there's something in there that you've just never gotten around to putting into your daily arsenal (for me it's the xargs tricks).

Btrfs is a new copy on write filesystem for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration. Initially developed by Oracle, Btrfs is licensed under the GPL and open for contribution from anyone.

In a shocking break from Apple and iPhone news, how about a preview of What's new in GIMP 2.6? They've mucked with the UI, improved the free selection tool (think the wand in photoshop) and a bunch of other stuff. Hit the link for details.

Miguel announces that Banshee 1.0 is out. Banshee is an itunes-like audio/video player for linux that is similar-but-different from Rhythmbox, the other itunes-like software out for the GNOME environment. Banshee has gone through many changes from the first 1.0-like release, going from audio player to super-fast (the searching of the song db is now immensely scalable) and fully manages your video collection as well.

Back in April 2006, a Debian user reported a problem using the OpenSSL library with valgrind, a tool that can check programs for memory access problems. It was reporting that OpenSSL was using uninitialized memory in parts of the random number generator (RNG) code. Using memory before it is initialized to a known value is a well known way to create hard-to-find bugs, so it is not surprising that the valgrind report caused some consternation.

Read the full thing, it's very interesting to see how it's maybe not a cut and dry issue of someone deleting something they shouldn't have.

Nice post at content consumer entitled The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment. Simple premise... using the new Ubuntu, assign a set of tasks to your girlfriend (computer related you perverts!) and see how she does. Click the link for the results.

Enlightenment 0.17, the big, long awaited new release of the Enlightenment project, has been in the making for a long time now - since December 2000, to be precise. E17, as it became known, is a complete rewrite of Enlightenment, complete with a set of base libraries (the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) turning it into a full-fledged desktop environment, complete with its own set of base libraries for building applications.

Finally Ubuntu 8.04 has been released. This is the LTS (Long Term Support) release which means that Ubuntu will continue to support the package for... uhm.... a long term. Check out the What's new in 8.04 for a full list along with lots of pretty screenshots.

Gentoo users out there, the new baselayout package is coming soon, converting from a lot of bash scripts into baselayout-2 which uses OpenRC. These changes are fairly major, so you'll want to check out the Baselayout and OpenRC Migration Guide to make sure your system isn't rendered unbootable!

If you're not interested in baselayout-2, check out these bootchart values and get a bit more excited. Note that these stats don't mean all that much if you hardly ever reboot your machine :)

I am part of a dying breed of people known as "shell users." We are an old-fashioned bunch, preferring the warm glow of a green screen full of text over the cold blockiness of a graphical interface. We use ssh, scp, and even occassionally ftp. Back in the days before high-speed connections ("broadband"), we would dial up during off-hours to avoid being slammed with huge phone bills. The whole "Microsoft Windows" fad will fade away sooner or later, but in the interim, our kind is facing extinction.

This is mostly for my own reference. Found a good page of IPtables Examples and programs including a very handy (for me right now) script that will convert the save format from iptables-save into a nice shell script.

I've been wanting to make a list like Ten things Linux distros get right (that MS doesn’t) for a while. I use Windows at work on a daily basis, and linux at home on a daily basis, and both do things well, and both do things suckily. Here's one guys opinion of the Windows suckage.

[...] All-in-one application sources. Man, I love my apt. Finding and downloading applications for Windows is a crap-shoot in almost every way. I find this especially handy when building new systems: it takes far longer to build, update, and add needed applications on a Windows system than on most Linux systems.

Noticed a thread on the EVMS-devel list on the status of EVMS. EVMS as you may know is the Enterprise Volume Management System for Linux, a nice system which brings partitioning, RAID, LVM, LVM2 and various other technologies under one management system, and something I use both at home and on the UFies.org system. The response to the thread was:

IBM has pulled all resources from EVMS. Some of the people previously assigned to EVMS are doing some work in their spare time, but apart from that, it's pretty much unmaintained.

That's a bit worrisome... I haven't seen any issues with EVMS, but I'd hate to upgrade the kernel and find suddenly things start breaking :( Is this the honeymoon fading for IBM's relationship with Linux, or just a project that never took off enough to keep putting resources into it?

Any replacements / alternative technologies for this stuff out there? Ubuntu seems to run plain LVM for their setup, and Ubunutu isn't (I hope) going anywhere anytime soon, so one presumes LVM will stick around. Maybe ZFS can be ported from Solaris? KTNXBAI. :)

Compiz Fusion has made it's first first release. 0.5.2. Compiz Fusion is the new(ish) un-branch of Compiz and Beryl with some sexy new effects and stuff to play with. Unfortunately it still lags unbearably when using nVidia Twinview (at least the last git version I tried out) :( Hopefully something that can be worked on in the next release.

Very cool stuff... lguest was merged according to kerneltrap. Remember KVM, a kernel module with build in paravirtualization built directly into the linux kernel? 'lguest' is similar, but unlike KVM, doesn't require the VT enabled CPU.

Performance is still not up to Xen or VMWare, but it is something that'll be built in the kernel, is lightweight, and gives people hackability.

I'm not sure if more virtualization is better. I'd rather see efforts go into one of the existing technologies to make it faster / better or more compatible. Course, maybe lguest is is the project that'll get this needed attention.

The Completely Fair Scheduler has been merged into the kernel 2.6.23 tree. This new scheduler (which decided which task to give the CPUs attention next) "tries to run the task with the 'gravest need' for more CPU time. So CFS always tries to split up CPU time between runnable tasks as close to 'ideal multitasking hardware' as possible."

I suppose it had to happen sometime, Mythbuntu 7.04 Public Alpha 1 has been released. MythTV has long been used on Ubuntu as the main installation platform, it makes sense to create a full release based on it!

This alpha can be used for running a live frontend from CD, and provides a good representation of where the GUI is headed for the installer.
The CD contains a backend/frontend full installation on disk with all plugins. Depending upon the choices made during an "Advanced Installation",
multiple packages will be removed from the installation.

Question is, do I nuke my current working setup which is a couple of mythtv releases behind to try this out or not :)

Well, title says it all... Fedora 7 released. Here are some details from the article.

Fedora 7 features the latest versions of many popular open-source software programs, including GNOME 2.18, KDE 3.5.6, Xorg 7.2, and version 2.6.21 of the Linux kernel, with integrated KVM virtualization support. The version of Xorg 7.2 included in Fedora 7 features extensive support for display hot-plugging, a much-anticipated feature that will hopefully eliminate the need for frustrating Xorg configuration tweaking typically required for multiple monitor configurations and projector support.

Very cool.... Miguel has announced that Paint.NET 3.0 for Mono is Now Public. Paint.NET is (for those who don't know) a fairly feature complete and complex, free .Net based paint program. Think a supercharged version of MS Paint that doesn't suck. Not quite photoshop, but pretty much all you need for most "normal" use. Homepage is here.

For you odd folks who like that KDE thing, you'll be happy to know that KDE 4.0-alpha1 Released: "Knut" has been released. Highlights are a new visual look, all sorts of cool stuff in the background, new default apps (dolphin for a file manager for example), composite enabled for eyecandy goodness, and much more. Probably still horribly unstable, and it sounds like it's still far from finished, however, I'm happy to see it being released and plan to check this out ASAP! :)

Personally I think that while E17 was the shiznit back in the day (transparent eterms! OMG!), however now it's really not all that relevant. Projects like Beryl and Compiz have far eclipsed the functionality that enlightenment gave us, and as cool as the new E17 stuff sounds (resolution independance, hardware acceleration, running on any device (like a cellphone)), if it's never released and available as a finished product (or as finished as any open source gets), how good is that? Duke-Nukem' ForE17 anyone?

That said, there are still people hacking away, which is great to hear.

Ubuntu 7.04 is out in the wild now, after lots of testing. The Ubuntu Linux home page has gone on a diet for the release, with only links to the upgrade and release notes as well as of course, all the mirrors.

Highlights for this release are the latest everything (gnome, kernel, OO.o, etc etc), sexy hardware accelerated graphics with Beryl/Compiz, new codec download manager, new 'restricted driver' (read: non-free) manager, windows migration tool and other stuff. More an incremental release than anything, still nice to see.

Now to see if the bug with installing root on a raid partition is fixed :)

Update: Yup, looks like it is. Now I'm safe to play with it at home to see if it should replace my Gentoo Linux desktop :)

Basically he enumerates a lot of studies and addresses a lot of issues such as the various Microsoft funded TCO studies with a barrage of articles and writings regarding why a company or person should choose Free / Open Source software.

Couple of big things this weekend..... first of all, Gaim has been renamed to "Pidgin" due to a legal war with AOL over the "AIM" part of the name. Stupid stupid stupid IMHO. Sadly I'm not a big fan of the new name, "pidgin" is harder to pronounce and spell than "gaim" in my opinion, but what do I know. At least now it's over they can start releasing new versions of the software. Wh00t.

Speaking of "wh00t", Debian 4.0 has been released. 4.0, or "Etch" was twenty-odd months in the making and is released for 11 different platforms. Highlights include:

Sadly a lot of the desktop apps are still lagging behind the current stable releases (GNOME 2.14 vs 2.18 is 2 stable releases, openoffice 2.0 vs 2.2), though a lot seem to be right on the money. I suppose those who use debian for the desktop are either using Ubuntu or are using unstable. I'm still lovin' debian as far as the server side though, and they have a great reputation for super-stable releases. Good on ya' Debian!

Saw a note (via digg) about an article on Linux MCE. Uhmm.... Why hasn't someone told me about this? Where did it come from? Auto-dims your lights (if you have a home automation system of course), can send a control application to bluetooth mobile phones, turns on your TV and receiver and sets the right inputs? Scans all networked computers for shared media? Cover-flow like browsing? Where the hell did this come from?

LinuxMCE is a free, open source add-on to Ubuntu including a 10' UI, complete whole-house media solution with pvr + distributed media, and the most advanced smarthome solution available. It is stable, easy to use, and requires no knowledge of Linux and only basic computer skills.

The video is a bit smarmy in it's comparison of LinuxMCE to Windows MCE though, something that the Linux Community has to work on. However, if the features they advertise work as... uhm.... advertised. I've had discussions with a buddy of mine on MythTV vs Windows MCE and MCE definately came out on top. I use MythTV and prefer it, but it's setup vs WinMCE make it far more usable to normal people (and even geeks). However, if LinuxMCE (which integrates MythTV) this works like they say, I'll be replacing my MythTV Box with this ASAP.

Anyone else know about this of have any experience in it?

Oh, and LinuxMCE also integrates Asterisk (the free phone system), provides network boot to easily put up other LinuxMCE systems in the home, and it seems like the list goes on and on...

Sorry for the rambling, but this is really exciting!

Update: OK, a bit more digging through the website has enlightened me a bit more. LinuxMCE is a project where the software is given away for free, but the commercial side of it is selling you consulting and a $1,000-$7,000 setup with varying levels complete home automation. So basically you can put it together yourself, get the right hardware, get the right bluetooth module yourself, etc etc, or pay someone to give you an out of the box plug and play solution. Looks like the software given away is 100% complete though, so if you can set it up and get the right hardware, you can make it work as advertised. I'm not 100% sure, but it looks like you might need two computers, a "core" and a "orbiter", where the latter is a non-hard drive, network boot device only that is what is connected to your AV equipment and is controlled by the core. Maybe, I'm not sure exactly if the "hybrid" setup is everything on one computer or everything on two...

Nice HOWTO from the Ubuntu community on running seamless windows XP under Linux. Not your standard "associate .exes with wine" though, this is about how to use QEmu. Check it out at Windows X PUnder Qemu HowTo.

Reverend Ted has a nice look at Mac vs. PC: How Would Linux Fit, looking at the position and the "mac vs pc" campaign from Apple. They also present their first spoof ad (here) presenting the Linux vs Mac vs PC concept to turn things a bit on their head. Not bad, but a bit.... "forced" somehow. Check it out and let me know what you think.

I think a project like Linux Personas quite well defines the term "passive aggressive". Basically they group Linux users into broad categories (experimenter, follower, application, geek, transitioner) to help "better understand the marketing opportunities". Then they provide stats like sales cycle length, potential revenue, etc.

There's even a funky screening tool (with well worded questions akin to "do you like linux, or do you care about your IT infrastructure" to let you determine if you should attempt a sale to them.

I so wish I could say that ironically the server that runs the site is Linux, but no, sadly it's W2k3.... I guess they won't make that mistake twice :)

Saw on digg that Beryl 0.2.0 was Released. Check out this comment for some of the new plugins and additions. Nice to see that some of them are not just plain old eyecandy, but actual productivity / workflow improvements.

Fedora v. Ubuntu: A Performance Look is a benchmark of games and various operations comparing fedora core 6 and 7 and ubuntu 6.10 and 7.04 (stable and unstable version of each main distro). Interesting, however the benchmarks are really close. I think the widest gap is 5 seconds difference in LAME compilation time and maybe 5 FPS running Enemy Territory. Wonder what that says.... Interesting also to see things like boot time differences.

The article also references a 64 vs 32 bit benchmarks article which is an interesting read.

Last year you noted that our infrastructure by FC5 was great. Yum was
doing upgrades well and we no longer suffered from "egregious fuckups."
But now you say it's a huge problem again in the current email by noting
our "incompetent repository maintenance" and our non-statically linked
rpm. So what is the problem? Is it user incompetence or are you
actually aware of the infrastructure changes that take place or are
taking place? Reading your message, my guess is you are just
misinformed and that frustrates you.

Linux.com reports on the big story (hehe) that ESR gives up on Fedora. Sounds like he discovered what I found years ago.... that RPM sucks is sub-optimal for my own personal use. Wonder if this'll throw the linux community into a tizzy?

For my own future reference, here's a good story on the much underused lsof and a nice cheatsheet for its various incantations (before I only really did an 'lsof -n | grep processname' or a 'lsof -p pid').

OMG! Why has no one told me about /dev/bollocks, the A middle-manager emulator for the Linux Kernel. It even has a perl module to help manipulate it. Basically it creates a file in /dev that will spew out random bullshit on demand! Too bad it's kernel 2.4 only :(

What easier way to install a Linux distro than going to a web page and running a little .exe? That's what goodbye-microsoft.com aims at. A little .exe modifies your boot screen to give you a choice to go to the debian installer (which appears to be all graphical and sexy now). Probably not something you should do without a bit of prior preparadness of course, but if you have a new computer, it's a lot faster than burning a CD and rebooting to get some linuxy-goodness installed.

A quick little story on kernel trap on Improving KVM Performance With A Tickless Kernel from the mailing list. Basically a patch (dyntick) that improved KVM (the built in kernel virtualization module if you didn't know that) performance. It basically removes some wasted cycles doing interrupts that aren't needed (I think I got that right).

Anyway, looking forward (still) to playing with this and KVM in general.

Found another article (with screenshots) on Linux KVM Virtualization Performance. KVM is the new kernel model virtualization technique, which allows you to run other OSs through a kernel module, very similar to vmware or Xen, but without the need for a modified kernel (Xen) or non-free application (vmware) and with increased performance because of how close it can run to the kernel (a la Xen).

Only sucky part is that you need a CPU with VT technology (either from Intel or AMD) built in. Of course, this means just about any CPU you buy these days, but not necessarily older ones.

Here's a good article on what happens When Linux Runs Out of Memory. It goes deep into the ins and outs of OOM (out of memory) situations and exactly what is going on when say, you run your backups and mysqld gets killed by the "OOM-Killer". Not that I'm talking from personal experience, no, not at all :P

Aaron Bockover writes up a cool entry on Cracking down on heap abuse in Mono, telling how he did optimization work in TagLib-Sharp (a mono library for MP3 tagging) and moved memory allocation down from (for example) 103mb to 16mb! I honestly don't 100% understand a lot of what is actually going on, but seeing optimization work like this really is cool to me. Keep up the good work!

Upstart brings the concept of an event-driven init system, taking benefit from hotplug to decide when to start processes. Eventualy upstart should even replace crond and inetd (InitNG has similar plans to cron). Besides a dependency awareness (like the current gentoo initscripts), parallel startup (idem) and better hardware utilization (like InitNG and others), Upstart is supposed to bring response to ACPI events, avaliability of network connections and so on.

Linux.com has a nice first look at Gaim 2.0. For those who don't know, GAIM is a trillian-like instant messanger client for GNOME which does MSN, ICQ, Jabber, and just about everything under the sun. The 2.0 version is the first major update in quite a while and looks good!

Saw this headline on my MythTV box this morning while browsing the latest news using it's built in RSS reader. What you should (and shouldn't) expect from 64-bit Linux. Unfortunately I had to wait until I got to work to read it, as the MythTV RSS reader reads the articles with Konqueror, which pops up an 'accept cookies' box that I can't answer with the remote, and I don't have a mouse hooked up to the box to deal with it, so I have to read around this stupid box in the middle of the screen. No worries, MythTV just had a new release (.20) which looks exciting. The big question of course is do I upgrade and potentially have to re-do my nicely setup for everything but RSS system :)

Oh right, the article. Pros and cons of 64bit Linux, nice for people looking at jumping into the 64bit world. As a note, this server, UFies.org, runs Gentoo compiled under the AMD64 profile (even though it's got intel CPUS), meaning it's all running 64bit. Nice and up to date, and one of the few (IIRC) distros that fully supports current software in 64bit.

Some interesting memory benchmarks comparing the major Linux desktop memory usage. From the conclusion:

Ok, that's it. I tried quite hard to get these numbers and make sure they're usable. I however cannot rule any possible mistake and I'm obviously biased, so while I tried to be fair, I probably quite wasn't (however, since I myself was curious about the results, what would be the point of cheating?). So, in case you don't believe me or these numbers, you're free to redo this yourself, as long as you do your benchmarks somewhat correctly (it's really simple to do them incorrectly, trust me). In fact, since this is actually several months old, it would be nice if somebody tried with GNOME 2.16 and saved me the work.

Of course as everyone knows, memory doesn't tell the whole story. Apps, look and feel, usefulness and comfort are going to be far more deciding factors than memory usage. Also, memory these days is cheap, and when a standard (IMHO) box is a 1G system, the difference of 100 or 200 megs is relatively trivial. Wel at least over here. For projects like One Laptop Per Child and a push for free software in developing countries (where a brand new amd64 with a Gig of RAM isn't as easy to come by) it is a factor.

On the other hand, it's nice to see that developers are taking more pains to reduce memory usage, or at least in the dev lists I watch for GNOME (2.14 and 2.16 had major focus on reducing memory use). Just because memory is cheap doesn't give you the right to use it up with poor programming.

More Linux Desktop Eye Candy
From a slashdot story onFedora's OpenGL Composite Desktop there is a link to an XGLvideo demo from Novell, showing some of the sexy effects available using some of the new compositing technology that is starting to come into it's own.

All I can really say is "holy shit" and "I want this now". Wonder how long before this is included in the mainline GNOME release and standard distros.

Another Get the Facts Page
This is something I've been meaning to put together for a while, looks like these guys beat me to it. Get the facts - The real ones is an attempt to dispute the "facts" on Microsoft's "Get the Facts" campaign. Sadly OS choice is a religious thing, and people are generally pretty dug in for their OS of choice, and will bring in whatever surveys or annecdotes that support their side of the story... it's human nature though, we all do it (IMHO).

New Funky Linux Install/ISO Method
PCLinuxOnline points to a new web based ISO creation method called InstaLinux, which basically runs you through a few questions, distro, packages, user setup, etc, and then pops you out a bootable ISO that you can burn and boot with. I'm playing around with this for the new UFies box... just to play with though, they don't have my distro of choice in their list unfortunately :)

It's obvious that some filesystems are better for some things than others, and there isn't a huge winner that does good in everything. However, I was really surprised as to how many benchmarks ReiserFSv4 lost. Reiser4 was slowest for removing lots of files and directories, finding lots of files and directories, and creating and copying files. Granted, some of these are Reiser4 losing by half a second, but other times it's losing by almost 15 seconds (copy a 1 gb file). For me this is interesting simply because of the Reiser4 claim that it's the fastest filesystem around. Of course, we all know lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. Of course, I think I trust the benchmarks from LG than from the ReiserFS site :)

Ext2 (the non-journaled FS) kicks everything else's ass a lot for speed, but that's mostly because it's a more simplistic filesystem. For the CPU utilization for the tests JFS looks like it comes out ahead, as it does in the final 'total test time' graph.

Remember the whole 'tools in the toolbox' thing. Course, I'm still not sure what to put as the filesystem for the up-and-coming new ufies.org box... will probably stay with ext3 unless someone has a really good reason to go elsewhere.

Redhat and Xen Virtualization Interview
The latest Red Hat Magazine has a nice article on The virtues of Xen. This is something that's already on my TODO list.... I have a spare system (or virtual machine) I can throw Fedora Core 4 on (which has Xen built in). This article nicely explains why this is cool...

Red Hat has announced it will push for Xen integration in the Linux kernel, and that virtualization and stateless Linux is the way to go. Hooray! But wait--what's the buzz all about? What's so special about virtualization anyway?

KMenu Replacement Ideas
I've never been to KDE-Artists.org, and when I checked out some stuff there today, I'm glad I did. Lots of good ideas, screenshots, and mockups of all sorts of things, including a 5 page thread looking for a kmenu replacement.

Self-certifying File System
I read about the Self-certifying File System (SFS) in my Security Hacks book. Basically a replacement for NFS where clients are required to authenticate themselves via key before they can share files. This eliminates the dangers of IP or file handle spoofing.

New Open Source Magazine
New Malaysian Open Source online Mag: MyOSS Magazine has their first edition up. It's in english, and has some nice articles, including a good one on the linux suspend to disk (hibernate in windows terms) system.

How Close is E17?
A bit old, and nothing like an official announcement, but a post on Rasterman.com shows some screenshots of E17 and reveals that the team is in a "mini freeze" state. Hopefully this means it's only a couple of years away from a release.... :)

Gentoo is a one-of-a-kind distribution, simple yet powerful. The only drawback is that it can take very long to compile software (I would love to test Gentoo on a AMD64), but the results made me forget that.

This is true enough, but after the inital "big ones" (gnome, kde, X, etc) on modern hardware it's really easy to get used to the time to emerge a package.

This is a classifier for the Linux kernel's Netfilter subsystem that identifies packets based on application layer data (OSI layer 7). This means that it can classify packets as HTTP, FTP, Gnucleus, eDonkey2000, etc, regardless of port. Our classifier complements existing ones that match on address, port numbers and so on.

Basically this means your firewall can be told to say, block http traffic into the network and it'll work regardless of if some clever employee has set up a webserver on port 8080, or 31337. Wonder how slow it is though, doing regex matching on application layer data doesn't scream "speed" to me :) Course, with todays bandwidth and computer speed....

Broken Remote X Over SSH in Gentoo Linux?
This might be the reason for some of the problems I've been having lately getting a previously working remote X to work from work to my Gentoo Linux system with the $DISPLAY variable just not working. Anyway, the mailing list came to the rescue again with thesetwo links telling you to comment out the DISPLAY variable declaration in /etc/security/pam_env.conf to fix it.

More Linux Boot Speedups
An intersting post on trying to get ubuntu linux to boot faster. Lots of optimizations and surgery to reduce some bad and old code. I can't wait until some of these updates and optimizations make their way down into "stable" distros.
This is a follow up to the challenge thrown down (well, kinda), in this earlier post.

Transparency Support in Metacity for X.org
Well, they call it transparency, but it's still not perfect. However, if you're running X.org 6.8 and GNOME, you might appreciate the patch for metacity that footnotes pointed to. Windows get transparent when moved, and you can toggle transparency from the window menu. Good start!

Using RAM as Swap Space
Kernel trap has an article on How to Use RAM as Swap. Basically you'd setting so that when you run out of physical memory instead of going to the hard disk for storage space, you move that into ... uhmm.... physical memory. Hmm.... Well, read the article and decide for yourself :)

X.org on Gentoo
Good thread on the gentoo forums on getting XOrg 6.7.99.x / 6.8.0 working. Sounds like the new X.org server (a replacement for XFree86) has "true" transparancey and some other goodies, at least in the CVS release. Something to try when I get home.

ZSH Info in the Forums
A cool thread on the gentoo forums for ZSH users (lovers?). I personally am a bash user, but that's mostly because it's the default. ZSH seems to have some pretty nifty features built right in. Might be time to check it out.

Halloween X1 - ESR Dishes Out Linux Propaganda
In a nice response to the latest bout of "Linux is horrible, all hail Microsoft" coming from Redmond, ESR has put together Halloween X1 (/. story) with some nice rebuttles to the current MS FUD campaign. He comes up with some good points as always.

To put the Microsofties really on the spot, it's most effective to phrase your counters as questions, especially when you can use them to whack Microsoft with a combination of issues like TCO and security. Like this:

How many Linux machines have been zombied by Netsky, Sasser, MyDoom, or similar worms? Do your Windows TCO estimates include administrator time spent cleaning up after these infestations?

Can you explain why Windows IIS websites are cracked or defaced more often than Apache ones, despite the fact that IIS runs less than a third the number of sites Apache does?

Is Microsoft willing to add a hold-harmless clause to Shared Source licenses that protects shared-source licensees against being sued by Microsoft for alleged IP violations related to the software? If not, then please explain again how Shared Source is just the same as open source?

I'm sure some microsofty or MS sympathizer can answer these of course. Scoble? You there? :)

That said, these questions aren't really as relevant as what I think the genius of Open Source Software is, which is, wait for it, CHOICE. If you want to use windows, use it, if you want to use linux, use it, but having only one player in the field is just bad for everyone, and when that one player is known for deceit and mercilessly squeezing out it's competition through underhanded tactics, you know it's even worse. If the government wants to use OpenOffice instead of word they should be able to do so without having to fight through paid off congressmen, FUD campaigns, and Microsoft funded Reports just because MS doesn't want anyone else to get the business.

Help Support Daniel Robbins of Gentoo
Looks like Daniel Robbins of Gentoo fame accumulated quite a bit of debt in his role of chief architect of the Gentoo project. Gentoo users are helping out with donations by clicking the big donate button on the top right and buying things from the gentoo store. I'm going to pick myself up a couple of t-shirts or something, and I hope you (other gentoo users or helpful individuals) do the same.

Using The GIMP
There is a good article on using the Gimp. Shows off a lot (but nowhere near all) of my favorite little graphic apps abilities. Not sure why they chose to use the 1.2 version and not the 1.3 (development but very usable and stable) version.

KDE 3.2 Screenshots
Some screenshots of the new KDE 3.2 alpha builds can be found here and here. Changes I've seen from a quick look appear to be a new konqueror look (a la finder), better file selector dialoge (with preview integration of files such as mp3), new protocols to go with fish:// such as fonts:/ and system:/, new itunes clone mp3 player, nicer background options (run apps like xearth), better anti-aliasing options, mouse cursor selector, ximerama config, better bookmark management in konq, nicer tabs in konsole, nicer preview throughout, and a ton of other stuff. Once it's compiled I'll have a better idea how much of a huge update it is :)

Daemon Tools for LinuxCDemu for Linux is very similar to Daemon Tools for windows. It allows you to mount a bin/cue CD image as a virtual CDROM. Pretty handy for those who don't have the disk space to use bin2iso anyway.

Mandrake LiveCD AnnouncedMandrakeMove Bootable Linux CD Announced. Very cool.... I used a couple of liveCDs recovering the UFies.org box yesterday. Knoppix sadly didn't support the extra IDE PCI controller I have in it, and the mandrake 9.2 install disk, while supporting the hardware, didn't have a decent set of tools for use for recovering the system. You can download the ISO from their mirrors. Will update if I find a non-european mirror or bittorrent link.

VNC to SWF
Very nifty looking tool, Vnc2swf allows you to record a VNC session to an SWF file, making it easy to create training material or even a quick tutorial to show granny how to use the GUI frontend for nmap properly :)

Simple MRTG Setup
There is a great SNMP guide/howto in the Gentoo Tips and Tricks forum. Cut and paste stuff, and quite complete, including CPU, RAM, etc etc etc. Gentoo specific as far as packages, but easily used for other Linux distros.

Linux Enhanced SMB Sharing
I haven't heard of Linux Enhanced SMBFS (CIFS) before, but it looks pretty cool. It's an alternative to NFS as a networked filesystem. Basically it works to remove some of the limitations that SMB has (lack of understanding users and perms properly for example).

SMBFS allows Linux to mount a remote SMB share but until now it did not act like a UNIX file system, even if the remote host was Samba running on a UNIX or Linux machine.

Kernel 2.6 Info
Some good kernel 2.6 info for people interested in trying out the 2.5.* series in anticipation of the soon-to-be-here 2.6 series. Information on some common gotchas (blank screen after decompressing kernel for instance), how to patch, things that are new, things that are gone, things that have changed.

I've personally played around with the 2.5.7[1-4] kernels a bit in trying to get my new motherboard to work (the nforce2 based A7N8X). I didn't notice a huge performance difference, even with the new schedular, but I was running a 2.4 kernel that had all the new 0(1) schedular stuff in it already. There are a few things in GNOME that need to be adapted for the new kernel still, but that'll happen when things get closer I'm sure.

The JabberD Quickstart package provides a graphical, user-friendly way to install, configure, and manage the JabberD instant messaging server. No hand-editing of XML files, no need to create spool directories, no messy configuration changes -- just a simple, step-by-step setup script that does all the work for you. It's the easy way to get started with Jabber. :)

More Intelligent Software RAID
This is the first I've seen of this project, which looks quite interesting for someone who loves software RAID like I do. Fast Intelligent Software RAID1 adds some extra smarts to the existing linux kernel RAID drivers, such as "...tracks missed mirror updates on a faulted mirror component and when the component is repaired it updates only the missed blocks, if that is appropriate, not the whole device." Very neat. Anyone used this yet?

Dynamic Perl Modules with Gentoo
While I have been using Gentoo linux for a while now,
I recently found out that it has the ability to dynamically create ebuilds (the gentoo
package format) for perl modules. No more worrying about "polluting" your system with
non-ebuild files, or trying to make your own! Just run:

host# g-cpan.pl Perl::ModuleName

And watch as it is created and installed for you, with any dependancies, automagically!
You can then remove it and manage it with Portage just like all your other ebuild packages.

Optimizing KDE
Interesting article linked from dot.kde.org about optimizing KDE performance. Some obvious tips, but some other things that you might not think of. Speaking as someone 19 hours into compiling KDE 3.1rc6, this is a good find :)

Virtual Mailhosting Howto
Ken has written up a very nice Virtual Mailhosting howto. It is based on gentoo, but should be easily adapted to other distributions. It covers postfix, apache, cyrus, courier, imap, sasl.... the works! Very nice work.

JWZ Rants on Linux Video
JWZ has an excellent rant on the state of Linux video and more importantly, why it sucks so much. Some of his problems seem to fall into the "well, it works for me, I don't know why it doesn't work for you" category. I use mplayer but only from the console, because the graphical version (gmplayer) is not what I need. I have used it a few times though, and it didn't do the things he described. I don't use redhat so I can't comment on installing gstreamer on a redhat system, but I have used XINE and while it seems to play things properly, the UI designer did seem to be on some serious crack.

All in all I think it does go back to the fact that there are many projects trying to do the same thing. I don't think that the alternative of having only one way to do things (ie: the microsoft mentality) is a better alternative.

Subversion Docs
From foz comes a link to Single-User Subversion, and it looks like, just like they did for the CVS book, red-bean.com has Suvbersion: The Definitive Guide online. It is a work in progress, and will be published sometime in the future by ORA. Some points are still missing, but it seems quite nice, and a good reference for people wanting to try out the source control system called Subversion.

Xandros Review
A very cool review from a guy on our LUG list. Robert has been under NDA until now, but since Xandros has shpped, he has some tantilizing tidbits on this new distro, some very very cool. The highlights:

Compiler Flags
... and from the same site as the last link, a good run down on which compiler flags to use when optimizing a linux source distro such as gentoo (or even just compiling any program I suppose).

Sunshinginabag closed :(
The excellent gnome theme site sunshineinabag.co.uk has closed, siting that art.gnome.org will be opening soon (it was created while waiting for a.g.o). There's still no sign of art.g.o yet however, but I do thank the people who ran sunshineinabag for the excellent site they put together! The opening of themedepot has also helped give people their theme fix :)

Linux: Now endorsed by Wil Wheaton
Over at Wil's BLOG he has decided to throw out a long article on his experiences with switching from windows to Linux. The article, entitled Penguin Time is quite good, and worth the read.

Symmetric multithreading (hyperthreading) is an interesting new concept that IMO deserves full scheduler support. Physical CPUs can have multiple (typically 2) logical CPUs embedded, and can run multiple tasks 'in parallel'...

New Linux SiteThis page was passed onto me this morning, and it looks quite good, even for "just another linux web page". It's got code exchange, and sections for the doers and the decision makers out there that are interested in linux. Head over to http://linux.ittoolbox.com and check it out.

Daniel Robbins (Gentoo) Interview
Tinyminds has a good interview with Daniel Robbins, of gentoo fame. It goes into the future, installers, spin-offs gcc-3.1, and the compile slowdows. An excellent article.

.mov comes to Linux
Thanks to Christophe for throwing me this tidbit. The sorenson codec, available before only under mac and windows, is available native via Xine .9.11. Here is the slashdot story. Xine is in debian unstable/testing for your enjoyment!

Gentoo Interview
Interesting interview over at OSNews with Daniel Robbins, of gentoo fame. A good interview that addresses a lot of the good (and not so good) of gentoo, as well as their future direction, and what they are doing as a company.

VIM Script Lovin'
Slightly related to the last entry, I've been going through some of the scripts and tips at vim.sf.net and have compiled a small list of ones I've started using, or think are amazing/incrediable/life-changing.

Themes.org
Well, themes.org has lay fallow for ages now.
Sites like kde-look and
sunshineinabag have moved
in and attempted to take up the slack. However, browsing to freshmeat
I saw a note saying that
the old themes.org themes had been rolled into themes.freshmeat.net.
I don't know how well things will work, but I wish them all the best!

The OE-ONE Distro
I have to give a hat tip to Foz and Engel for sending me over to the OE-ONE website. They have what Microsoft was fearing a while back, a browser based desktop (calender pics, better to check out the flash demo available on the main page). They have basically taken mozilla and used it like it should be used, an application via the XUL interface. It looks really slick, and the sort of thing that my mother could deal with. A review on Newsforge is here.

Anyone had any experience with this software? I'd normally be more than happy to lay down the $40CND for the software distro, but at this moment I'd like to know that it's as cool as it looks before laying ca$h on the table. I don't suppose any OE-ONE guys out there want to send me an eval version do they? :)

New GNOME Themes Site
Well, since themes.org has lapsed lately, there
is a new site out of the UK that is becoming a theme center.
http://www.sunshineinabag.co.uk
has gtk, gtk2, sawfish, meta themes, as well as nautilus themes and emblems. A
very good site, still being filled up with new themes and in need of some minor
UI features (new themes at the top of the page for example :) but a great resource nonetheless.